"It
is a noble idea for a film to satire some of the
best known American pop culture heroes of the
1950s."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

It is a noble idea for a film to satire some of the
best known American pop culture heroes of the 1950s.
It's directed and written by the Britisher Nicolas
Roeg, adapted from a Terry Johnson play conceived in
1982. In 1954, the filmmaker fantasizes what would
have happened if Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell),
Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Joe DiMaggio (Gary
Busey), and Senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis) met
in a hotel room in New York City on one blistering hot
day. The film often misses the target but since it
throws everything into the mix, it sometimes is
delightfully on target providing both amusement and
thought-provoking reactions.

The fictionalized encounters capture the essence of
the pop culture characters rather than depicting them
as real-life characters, though using what knowledge
the public has of them allows the characterizations to
be pretty close to the truth. It shows the icons were
concerned about the following topics: fame, vanity,
communism vs. democracy, world peace, jealousy, Freud,
love, The Theory of Relativity, the physical
appearance of the universe, the A-bomb, hatred, and
freedom of speech.

What really makes this film work, are the excellent
performances by the stars. Michael Emil makes for a
fine childlike genius, wearing a sweatshirt with the
block letter P for Princeton emblazoned on it. He sits
in the hotel room late at night working on his Field
Theory when who should pop in, but Marilyn Monroe
looking for an intelligent conversation. She has just
finished shooting her famous scene from The
Seven Year Itch, where a wind gush under a NYC
subway grating blows her skirt up and one can see her
panties. Marilyn is the life of the film presenting a
sexy and engaging sex goddess, who is both vulnerable
and pushy.

The genius and the sexpot sit and talk about The
Theory of Relativity, which Marilyn accurately
explains by a demonstration of toys and a flashlight
on the floor. She then says she learned it without
understanding it. Einstein is upset by that,
mentioning that knowledge isn't something that is
true--it's just an agreement made by people that makes
it seem true. He says that real knowledge comes about
by turning over possibilities, which is the method of
thinking about things.

Gary Busey is the chain-smoking Yankee Clipper who
can't understand his starlet wife and her
psychological problems that revolve around her
insecurities and the hatred of her step-mother, but is
jealously in love with her. He comes at 3 a.m. banging
on the professor's hotel room door, expecting his wife
to be there. She has not been with him for the last
two weeks, as she was having another extra-marital
affair. He is portrayed as a buffoon who is
self-absorbed with his fame and baseball achievements,
with the running gag being that he is someone who
loves collecting bubble gum baseball cards of himself.
Marilyn calls him stupid, complaining she never had an
intelligent conversation with him. Somehow Emil,
Busey, and Theresa survive the night, with Emil
voluntarily leaving his room for another in the hotel
to placate the jealous baseball slugger.

For my money, the best scene in the film was in the
brief contact between Will Samson, the proud Cherokee
elevator attendant, who is taking Einstein to a room
on a different floor to escape from Marilyn and Joe.
When Einstein tells him that the Indians believe that
wherever they stand is the center of the universe,
Samson responds that he just eats hot dogs and goes up
and down all day in the elevator; and, an interesting
conversation develops, with the Indian suggesting that
Einstein is really a Cherokee because of his views.

The most terrifying carrier of world gloom is Tony
Curtis, as the witch hunting junior senator from
Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. He's in Einstein's room to
subpoena him to testify before his House of
Un-American Committee and is shown as a repressed
Catholic, a hypocrite, a boozer, an anti-Semite, a
paranoid nut who is hell-bent through his powers in
the senate to head a committee that sniffs out people
he doesn't feel comfortable about by naming them as
commies and thereby ruining their careers.

Einstein challenges the senator's authority and says
he will go to his World Peace conference and will not
testify before the senator's committee.

The film is a bit of a mess, with no certain plot
and it seems to have no particular aim it hopes to
accomplish. But as a diverting look at these fantasies
of the four 1950 icons, it makes for provocative
theater and in the process, it sometimes offers us
some inspired thoughts. It sort of sucks you along for
its ride and you don't mind going along because its
kind of fun to imagine how those characters really
were. The film's efforts might be comparable to a guy
fantasizing how it would be to sleep with Marilyn
Monroe.